Page 58 of If Looks Could Kill
“My name is Tabitha Woodward,” I told her. “I learned of you from Giselle, from the Curiosity Musée.” Close enough to the truth.
Clearly, that got her attention. She seemed almost nervous.
“What did she tell you?” Her voice sounded like paper rustling.
I leaned in closer and spoke softly. “Are you a Medusa?”
A shiver seemed to pass through her. She swiftly shut the door.
“Miss Tabitha?” Mike called. “Are you all right?”
I waved a hand in his direction and tapped at the door with my other.
“Please,” I called, sotto voce. “My friend has just become one. Tonight.”
I thought I heard her breath on the other side of the door. Or maybe it was only mine.
“Some violent, wicked men are chasing us,” I said. “We just helped rescue two friends of ours from an infamous brothel. We desperately need help.”
I waited for a long moment that stretched taut and thin, like a rubber band.
The door opened another inch.
“Your friend became a Medusa,” she said slowly, “at a brothel. Where you were mounting a rescue mission.”
The sarcasm was lost on me then. Her volume in Mike’s presence, however, was not. “Shh,” I whispered. “Not quite. The Medusa part was beforehand.”
“Seems all that’s lacking is the brass band,” she said. “I will not be made into a mockery.”
I glanced at my shivering companions, and something in me snapped.
“Listen,”I hissed. “If you were lying when you wrote those letters to the Gorgon of Gotham, then you might as well turn us out into the cold. But if you’re not a fraud—if you were telling the truth—if you really are a Medusa, and if your heart isn’t made of absolute stone, you should let us in. And help us.”
I waited in agony. Nothing. I had gone too far. My bravado had killed our chance.
The hinges creaked as she opened the door wider and fixed me with a penetrating stare. “And if my heartismade of absolute stone?”
Saints preserve me from crabby old women!
“Then at least let us in out of the cold,” I told her, clinging to my last nerve, “and we’ll be out of your hair by morning.”
She made a sound that might almost have been a laugh, then opened the door wide. “You’ve won the hour,” she said, “and piqued my curiosity. Come inside, and we shall see what this night brings.”
Tabitha—Stella(Sunday December 2, 1888)
I hurried back to the others. “We can go in,” I told Cora and Freyda. They nodded and headed for the door. I supposed no strange old woman could hold any terrors for them after what they’d been through.
“Go ahead, Pearl,” I told her, but she clung to my arm. It melted me a bit.
“Who is this person?” she whispered to me.
“I’ll explain,” I told her. “In just a moment.”
How to answer, in Mike’s presence? What, in fact, to do with Mike? We were here because Miss Stella, I thought, I hoped, was a Medusa. And that was the absolute last conversation I wanted to have with him.
Mike seemed to read my apprehension.
“Is it just that old lady who lives here?” he asked. “No one else?”
